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We all want our success now
We tend to think that reaching our massive goals requires some grand, overnight gesture
But the truth they don’t tell you in motivational videos is that real success is actually incredibly boring
It comes down to plain old discipline and the repetitive grind of building
excellent habits
It’s about waking up early,
pouring a cup of that magic dirt water that weaves a spell over the morning,
and relying on plain old “ass in seat” grit to do the work.
Most people fail because they try to fix their entire year in a single day.
But big success stories come from the cumulative effect of little things done daily.
If you focus on getting just 1% better every single day, you build a massive compound effect.
The math is hard to deny
a 1% daily improvement yields an over 1000% improvement by the end of a single year.
This is the true power of compounded routines.
Just like compound interest in the stock market,
if you make small, consistent daily investments in your goals, you don’t have to rely on a sudden stroke of luck,.
You must stay consistent
and refuse to accept a “draw” for the day,
because a start that equals a draw is just an L in disguise.
Stop waiting for the perfect moment or the first of the month to wipe the slate clean,.
Remember the old saying
slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
Building muscle memory through a strict daily routine conserves your brain’s energy so you can tackle the real obstacles in your path
Not just exercise
Anything you want to get better at
Find your 1% improvement today.
GET AFTER IT.
AND
PLUS DON’T MISS:
June | The Fiction Giveaway Extravaganza! group promo
AND
From BAKED NAKED (two words, spelled the same, but English is weird, right?)
Chapter One
“That is not a boat,” Dee Ann said.
She said it from the marina office doorway, which was itself unusual — Dee Ann conducted most of her observations from behind the sliding window rather than in person, and coming to the doorway meant the situation had crossed some threshold of significance that the window no longer adequately addressed. She had her coffee and her clipboard and she was looking north along the commercial dock toward the vessel that had been attempting to dock at the commercial slip for the past eleven minutes.
Gumbo was on the stern of the Severance Package with the composition book open on the table and a Yuengling at seven-fifty in the morning, which was a philosophical position he’d arrived at after fourteen months in Cedar Key and was no longer interested in defending. He looked where Dee Ann was looking.
The vessel coming into the commercial slip was turquoise and coral — not the weather-faded turquoise and coral of a boat that had started some other color and given up, but an intentional, branded, graphic-design-approved turquoise and coral that caught the morning light the way something catches light when it has been specifically engineered to catch light. It had a sun deck the size of a tennis court, a DJ booth on the bow that was currently unmanned but visibly capable, and along its port side, in letters four feet tall that Gumbo could read from slip 12 without his reading glasses, the words PARTY BARGE.
Below that, in slightly smaller letters: 2.4M SUBSCRIBERS.
Below that, in letters that required mild squinting: a social media handle he did not recognize.
“It’s a content production vessel,” Gumbo said.
Dee Ann looked at him.
“I read an article,” he said.
“You read an article,” she said.
“In the Tampa Bay Times. Two weeks ago.” He picked up the Yuengling. “They cruise the coast. Port to port. Make videos.”
“Videos of what.”
“The coast. Parties. Contests. Local color.” He paused. “People watch them on the internet.”
Dee Ann looked back at the vessel. It had covered approximately forty additional feet in the time they’d been discussing it and was now close enough that they could see the crew on deck — a production team in matching turquoise shirts moving with the focused choreography of people who had done this docking sequence at enough ports that it was becoming automatic.
“How many people,” Dee Ann said.
“Two point four million subscribers,” Gumbo said. “Give or take.”
Dee Ann looked at the vessel. She looked at the commercial slip, which was rated for vessels up to 120 feet. She looked at the vessel again.
“It’s not going to fit,” she said. She went back inside and picked up the dock phone.
It fit, barely, in the way that things fit when the person managing the situation has thirty years of marina experience and a specific voice she uses when she needs a captain to understand that she is not making a suggestion. Dee Ann got on the radio at seven-fifty-four and by eight-oh-seven the Party Barge was in the commercial slip with its bow extending eight feet past the dock’s end and a stern line run to a cleat Gumbo could see from his own stern and a very large turquoise and coral boat sitting in Cedar Key City Marina like something that had been set down by someone who had been somewhere else and made a wrong turn.
Gumbo opened the composition book to a fresh page.
He wrote the date at the top. Below that: Party Barge — 142 ft., converted offshore supply vessel, turquoise/coral livery, commercial slip, arrived 0807. He paused. 2.4 million YouTube subscribers. Party Barge LLC, WaveRight Media platform. He looked at the vessel. What does it cost to operate a 142-foot vessel?
He worked the arithmetic in his head the way he’d worked supplier cost structures for twenty-eight years in Columbus — not the specific numbers, which he didn’t have, but the shape of them. A converted offshore supply vessel of that size, diesel engines, running at cruising speed of twelve to fifteen knots: call it thirty gallons per hour minimum, probably forty. At current fuel prices, a full day’s running was a significant number. Add crew of twenty, camera equipment, post-production staff, the travel logistics of moving a 142-foot vessel from port to port — the overhead on this operation ran to something substantial before a single video was made.
He looked at 2.4 million subscribers.
The monetization math on 2.4 million YouTube subscribers, with the engagement metrics a party content channel would generate, at standard CPM rates — he did it in his head, then revised it upward for sponsorship revenue, then revised it upward again for brand partnerships and merchandise and platform licensing deals with a network behind it.
The numbers balanced. Barely, but they balanced.
He wrote: Revenue barely covers cost at this scale. The margin is thin. Thin margin means pressure. Pressure means the content has to perform, continuously, at volume. That’s a specific kind of stress on a specific kind of operation.
He capped the pen and looked at the vessel.
The production crew in turquoise shirts was deploying a gangway with the efficiency of a team that had done this before. Two cameras were already running on deck — handheld, shoulder-mount, the professional grade. A third camera on a stabilized gimbal was sweeping the marina approach, getting the establishing footage that would become the first thirty seconds of whatever video this stop produced.
One of the cameras was pointed at Gumbo.
He did not wave.
By nine o’clock, Cedar Key City Marina had approximately two hundred and forty people on it or adjacent to it, which was a number the marina had not accommodated simultaneously in Gumbo’s experience and which Dee Ann was managing from the office doorway with the clipboard and the specific expression she reserved for situations that required her full attention and disappointed her by existing.
They had come from SR-24, from the waterfront parking, from the island’s interior streets — residents and day visitors and a contingent of people who had driven specifically from the mainland because the Party Barge’s location was posted in real time on its social channels and its audience had a demonstrated willingness to show up wherever it went.
Gumbo watched this from the stern with the composition book and a second Yuengling.
The Party Barge’s gangway was now in place and a controlled flow of approved visitors was coming aboard — not the crowd on the dock, but a selected group of perhaps thirty people who had some credential or connection or had won some social media contest that entitled them to board access. A camera documented each boarding.
Two people came down the gangway onto the dock and moved toward the marina’s general area with the professional confidence of people accustomed to arriving and being interesting.
Gumbo looked at them.
The man was tall — six-two, maybe six-three — with a tan that spoke of deliberate maintenance rather than outdoor work, and the teeth visible even at forty yards of someone whose dental investment was a business expense. He had a wireless microphone on a lanyard and the kinetic energy of a person who ran at a social frequency higher than most people’s comfortable range. He was already talking to someone, to everyone, to the camera tracking him from the deck above — his hands moving, his smile expanding and contracting at a rate that communicated enthusiasm while concealing the effort behind it.
The woman beside him moved differently. Where the man expanded into every available space, she contracted into precision — reading the dock, the marina, the crowd, the light on the water, the camera angles, all of it processed in the peripheral awareness of someone who ran a real-time inventory of every room she entered. She was thirty or thirty-one, with dark hair pulled back in a way that was practical rather than styled, and when her eyes moved across the marina and landed briefly on Gumbo on the Severance Package’s stern, the assessment took about two seconds and was complete and he had the impression she’d filed him under something specific.
He wrote in the composition book: Brad Colter (host, male) — professional warmth, high volume, works the crowd. Jana Voss (host, female) — reads the room first, adjusts second. Different speeds.
It was Gary Timms who told him about the bikini contest.
Gary called at ten-fifteen, which was early for Gary to be at the bar but not early for Gary to be at the bar preparing for a day that was going to require preparation. He said: “The Party Barge people are doing a coconut oil suntan bikini contest on the dock at four this afternoon and they want a local judge and someone gave them your name.”
“Who gave them my name,” Gumbo said.
“I may have mentioned you,” Gary said.
“Why.”
“Because the person asking me for local judge recommendations was a very pleasant woman from the production team and I thought it would be entertaining,” Gary said. “And because your name came to mind and I said it before I considered the consequences, which is a thing that happens.”
“Tell them no,” Gumbo said.
“They called Dee Ann,” Gary said.
A pause.
“They called Dee Ann to confirm you,” Gumbo said.
“Dee Ann told them you were a licensed private investigator, which they interpreted as a law enforcement credential, and apparently a law enforcement credential gives the contest a useful legal authority optic for their content.” Another pause. “Dee Ann seemed to find this outcome acceptable.”
“Dee Ann doesn’t find anything acceptable or not acceptable,” Gumbo said. “She processes the situation.”
“She told them your slip number,” Gary said.
Gumbo looked at slip 12, from which the Party Barge was visible at the commercial dock, enormous and turquoise and coral and currently deploying what appeared to be a secondary sun deck extension off the port side.
“I’ll think about it,” he said.
“The woman from the production team is walking down your dock right now,” Gary said.
He was right. A woman in a Party Barge turquoise shirt was coming along the finger pier toward slip 12 with the direct approach of someone who had made this walk at multiple ports and had developed a method.
Gumbo put the phone in his shirt pocket. The shirt was the orange one with the white flowers — the collar open, the fabric already pulling at the humidity, the pelican on the left breast pocket that he’d noticed when he bought it and that had not affected the purchase decision either way.
The woman stopped at the end of the finger pier.
“Mr. Malone?” She had a production tablet in one hand and the efficient affect of someone managing twenty things and currently attending to this one. “I’m Sasha, location coordinator for Party Barge. Gary Timms suggested—”
“I know what Gary suggested,” Gumbo said.
“We do a regional judge segment at every port. Local flavor, authentic voice—”
“I heard the pitch,” Gumbo said. “No.”
Sasha made a note on the tablet. She had the expression of someone for whom no was a data point rather than a conclusion. “Jana would like to speak with you if you have a few minutes,” she said. “She’s at the forward deck.”
“Jana can speak with me here,” Gumbo said.
Sasha made another note. She walked back up the finger pier.
Three minutes later, Jana Voss came down the finger pier alone, without the camera that had been tracking her earlier, without the production tablet, without any of the apparatus of the Party Barge operation. She stopped at the end of the pier and looked at the Severance Package and at Gumbo on its stern with the composition book and the Yuengling and the pelican shirt.
“Your friend Gary is extremely enthusiastic about this idea,” she said.
“Gary’s idea of entertainment and mine don’t always overlap,” Gumbo said.
“Fair.” She looked at the marina. Not the performance of looking — actually looking, the inventory she’d run on the dock running again here, the real assessment of a specific place. “This is a genuinely good marina,” she said. “Not a production marina. A real one.”
“It’s been a real one for a long time,” Gumbo said.
“You can tell.” She paused. “The woman in the office.”
“Dee Ann.”
“She told our dockmaster that our port side line needed to be repositioned by eighteen inches or we’d be pulling stress on the cleat fitting during the afternoon tide shift.” She paused. “She was right. Our dockmaster didn’t know that yet.”
“Dee Ann knows this marina,” Gumbo said.
“She’s been running it through two ownership changes and one bankruptcy,” Jana said.
He looked at her.
“I do my research on every port,” she said. “It’s not all coconut oil and DJ sets. Some of it is actually paying attention to where you are.” She looked at the composition book on the table. “You were writing something when I came down the dock.”
“I write things down,” he said.
“What things.”
“Things that need to be written down.” He closed the composition book. “You want me to judge your bikini contest.”
“I want a local judge who isn’t going to play to the camera,” she said. “Brad plays to the camera. Our three regulars play to the camera. Everyone on this vessel plays to the camera constantly. It’s professionally required and personally exhausting.” She paused. “Gary Timms says you’re a PI who used to run procurement for a paper company in Ohio and you moved here and got a PI license from the internet for eighty-nine dollars.”
“It’s a real license,” Gumbo said. “The lamination is a humidity problem.”
She looked at him with the expression she’d had in the two-second assessment on the dock — complete and filed.
“Will you do it,” she said. Not the pitch. The direct question.
He looked at the Party Barge. At the 142 feet of it occupying the commercial slip. At the secondary sun deck extension going up on the port side. At the two cameras still running on the main deck and the crowd on the waterfront that had grown past two hundred and fifty and was now absorbing people from the SR-24 parking area at a steady rate.
He thought about what it cost to run this operation and what it generated and how thin that margin was and what thin margins did to the people managing them.
“Four o’clock,” he said.
“Four o’clock,” she confirmed. She walked back up the finger pier with the same direct efficiency she’d come down it with, and Gumbo watched her go and then looked at the composition book and opened it.
He wrote: Jana Voss — researched the port in advance. Knew Dee Ann’s history. Came down the pier alone without a camera. Asked a direct question and waited for a direct answer. He paused. The gap between what she presents on camera and what she presents in person is worth noting.
He wrote: 4 p.m. Bikini contest. God help me.
He dated the line.
He did not sign it yet because the day was just beginning and the 142 feet of Party Barge at the commercial slip had the look of something that was going to generate several more pages before it was done.
He picked up the Yuengling and looked at the marina filling up with people who had driven here specifically to stand near a boat they’d seen on the internet, and he thought about the gap between what something costs and what someone says it costs, and he thought that two point four million subscribers was a very large number to carry on a very thin margin, and that people carrying heavy things on thin margins made decisions under pressure that people without that pressure did not make.
He did not know yet what decisions had been made.
He knew the shape was there.
That was where it always started.
😊😊😊😊😊